It not only pushed SharePoint Enterprise onto the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, but introduced new pay-as-you-go and bring your own license (BYOL) options. That means even the smallest enterprises can access SPE just as long as they need it.

This also means enterprises can use SPE for short term single projects, or even for development projects for a little as an hour.

Addressing Budget Issues

SPE is a more feature-rich version of the standard SharePoint. It comes with a number of additional features including search thumbnails and previews, rich web indexing, business intelligence integration, dashboards and business data surfacing among other things.

Data Resolution already provides Microsoft Dynamics hosting and has designed these new offerings to run on optimally-sized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types.

This means that workloads will operate in a high-performing computing environment. But is there really a market for this? “There was no availability of a simple SharePoint Enterprise offering available that an end user or partner could acquire pre provisioned with a SaaS model. The demand had been identified before and not yet been met," James Pathman, CEO of Data Resolution, told CMSWire.

He added that the pay-as-you-go model works well for customers who need a server for development, testing, proof of concept or migrations. (The company also offers annual agreements.) There are five different plans:

SharePoint Enterprise 2013 for AWS Basic: This is an all in one package that has been optimized for smaller enterprise deployments for test and development scenarios

SharePoint Enterprise 2013 for AWS Business: This package is for 25 users and is for enterprises that are looking for a collaboration tool in multiple geo-locations. It also offers support for external users and features a single instance of Active Directory 2012, Microsoft SQL 2012 and Windows Server 2012

SharePoint Enterprise 2013 for AWS Advanced: This is pretty much the same thing for up to 100 users

SharePoint Enterprise 2013 for AWS Business – BYOL for up to 25 users: This is for enterprises bringing their own existing SharePoint license and looking to move from on-premises to the AWS cloud

SharePoint Enterprise 2013 for AWS Advanced– BYOL for up to 100 users: This package is for organizations that currently have an existing SharePoint license and looking for a high-performance solution, running in the cloud

For enterprises that don’t fit into these categories, Pathman said they can work out a solution depending on their needs. It is also for those organizations that don’t have the expert skills to implement SharePoint

“Our solution is easy for a non-technical business user to spin up and use to meet their business cases. For organizations with technical expertise, this still solves the problem of providing a solution quick and easily, without the technical configurations, hardware provisioning and taking away from other priorities. In all scenarios, this solution is monitored, managed, and support," he added.

SharePoint 2016

So far, all this has been focused so far on SharePoint 2013. This will change once SharePoint 2016 becomes available, which Data Resolution will also make available.

“SP2016 will be available at the end of May 2016 and we are in testing the solution. Our deployment of SharePoint Enterprise on AWS can be configured easily to work with O365 or SharePoint Online. Specifically, SharePoint Enterprise on AWS can be used for internal (intranet) deploys, and external (internet/extranet deploys). SharePoint Online is intended only for internal deployments as it require a O365 or Active Directory account.

After that, Pathman said the company will be looking at industry specific deployments of SharePoint Enterprise on AWS for document management, workflow and other enterprise problems.

Through the next several months it will deploy Dynamics ERP products on AWS (AX, SL, NAV and GP, including vertical solutions) and also Windows Server bundled and managed stack components on AWS.